Ursonography (Excerpts), Jaap Blonk & Golan Levin, 2005

This 6'15" video presents excerpts from the premiere of Blonk & Levin's "Ursonography", at the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival, Linz. All of the text in this concert was performed live, in real-time, using custom software.

Ursonography (2005: Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin) is a new audiovisual interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, a masterpiece of 20th Century concrete poetry in which speech is reduced to its most abstract and musical elements. Dutch sound poet and virtuoso vocalist Jaap Blonk has performed the half-hour Ursonate more than a thousand times; in this presentation, Blonk’s performance is augmented with a modest but elegant new form of expressive, real-time, “intelligent subtitles.” With the help of computer-based speech recognition and score-following technologies, projected subtitles are tightly locked to the timing and timbre of Blonk’s voice, and brought forth with a variety of dynamic typographic transformations that reveal new dimensions of the poem’s structure.